Dining Daily with the Saints - Introduction
Dining Daily with the Saints
Three Hundred and Sixty-Six Recipes for
Three Hundred and Sixty-Six Feasts
Table of Contents
Dining Daily with the Saints: Introduction
Introduction
In our family, we often connect feast days to food. It is a great way to come together and if done well, it is a good catechetical tool for children. As a parent, probably the question I am asked more than any other is, “What’s for dinner?” As much as we have connected dinner to religious things, we have a daily opportunity to invest our children with lessons, rituals, and meaning beyond the prayer before meals.
This cookbook is not the direct result of our practice. It is more of an auxiliary product. We rhythm our meals by the liturgical calendar, color by color according to our Family Rule. We also have specific meals on specific days, probably more so than the average family. I do remember as a child wondering “If it’s called a feast day, why don’t we feast?” all of these together lead to my rash vow in the middle of 2017, where I decided I was going to post a hagiography connected to a recipe every day for a year on the (now defunct) SNSL Facebook page. The result is the original form of this work. Some of these recipes we follow on the assigned day. But most were simply compiled out of my daily devotion.
As usual, the hagiographies and pictures are almost directly copied from the website Catholic Saints Info with a little editing for clarity or simplicity. In the original manifestation, they are simply screenshots of the saint of the day off my phone connected to a recipe for the post. The recipes are stolen from across the internet. The cookbook is the product of a real-time devotional process. Because of that, I did not think to even document where I got all the recipes from. Hopefully, that doesn’t cause any problems, but if anyone comes looking they can have the money I make from this endeavor.
In choosing the saints I almost always went for saints that do not capture the popular imagination. I shot for the obscure mainly because these are the ones who most need to be taught. The recipes are somehow connected to the saint. Most of the time it is either a connection of geography or a really bad pun. Even for some serious situations in saints lives the general tone of the book is whimsy. These are the types of things that stick in children’s heads when teaching.
Being a “catholic” [Universal] cookbook, the stories of the saints span the entire scope of human history, starting with Eve (December 24), through many Old Testament saints and even Saint Josaphat AKA The Buddha (November 27th). There is a multitude of saints and recipes from each continent representing a wide variety of cultures, ethnicities, stations in life, cognitive abilities, handicaps, and hopes. Within there are recipes for slaves, dwarves, kings, transfolk, reformed Satanists, popes, priests, soldiers, the disfigured, the beautiful, laborers, and housemaids. There are those singularly focused on God from birth, and those tending to debauchery their entire lives, consecrated, priests, brothers, sisters, monks and nuns, hermits, and married couples canonized together. There are those martyred by pagans, communists, nazis, and even fellow Christians.
I am happy to have finally organized the cookbook here for ease of access and navigation. I hope the reader enjoys it and maybe eleven finds a good recipe.
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